Actress Christine Ebersole's balancing act subject of Rider address

LAWRENCE— Rider University’s School of Education has been celebrating their centennial since the beginning of the year and the school, which prepares students for the non-traditional future of education, has selected a non-traditional actress to present the new norm.

Two time Tony Award winningBroadway, movie and television actress, Christine Ebersole will join her husband, artist Bill Moloney, to discuss balancing their roles as parents and celebrities in today’s world. Dubbed “The New Normal,” Ebersole will discuss her “new norm” family, their “new norm” lifestyle and the “new-norm” of education, during the program on Wednesday, March 6, starting at 6 p.m.

“It’s a transracial family, my husband and I are Caucasian, and none of the children are,” Ebersole said when describing the racial make-up of her family. The actress, who was unable to get pregnant, adopted three children: “Mae-Mae is from China, Aron is Chinese and Filipino and Elijah is African-American.”

Ebersol, whose television fame includes stints on “Saturday Night Live,”“Ugly Betty,”“Will and Grace,” and, most recently, “Sullivan and Son” on TBS, chose to be an adoptive mother to babies who needed her and whom she needed to take care of. Never thinking twice about the esthetic look of the family unit, she simple believes love is colorblind. “The way we see it we are spiritual beings, which are closed in temporary housing, and some houses are white some, houses are brown, and some houses are yellow,” said Ebersole.

“When you love someone, you don’t love them for the color of their skin. You don’t say ‘Oh my God, I so love the color of your skin,’ you just don’t say that.”

The non-traditional mother nutured her children and her acting career simultaneously, attributing her success as a performer and as a parent, to her stay-at-home husband. Ebersole’s career path took her from the small screen, to movie screen to theater stage — with memorable Broadway performances in “42nd Street,”“Grey Gardens” and “Dinner at Eight” and she has appeared in such major motion pictures as “Amadeus,”“Tootsie” and “My Girl 2.”

“I had a lot of support, my husband being home, and that was a big factor,” said Ebersole. “My career took me away a lot, even just doing Broadway shows I’d be gone six days a week, never tucking the kids in bed, never reading them a bedtime story, I’d see them like 20 minutes a day.”

The children, who are now in their teens and early 20s , were sent to public schools in New Jersey, a decision Ebersole says, in retrospect, was probably not the best situation for the kids.

“We’re depending on the state to raise our children, and this is why (as a country,) we are in such big trouble.” Ebersole, whose daughter is currently a teacher in the public school system, is outraged at the extreme limitations to play and learn the fine arts that children currently experience in schools.

“My daughter came home and told me they are taking away recess from the kids, how can they do that? They’ve turned public schools into a prison system, it’s absolutely diabolical, I mean my daughter would come home and say she was not allowed to run on the playground,” she said.

“It’s all about control. It’s about taking control of your children and making them obedient. That’s why art and music and dance and theater have all been taken away and the reason why they’ve been taken away is because when you have those things, then you have human beingswho think for themselves and knows themselves and are not afraid of themselves.”

Ebersole will continue her conversation about the “New Normal,” at Rider University’s School of Education on March 2013. For more information, contact the School of Education at (609) 896-5048.